1979 Wichita Falls TX tornado

Hometown Hoedown With Linda Broday

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Although I wasn’t born here, I consider Wichita Falls, Texas to be my hometown. You see, I called it home for thirty-eight years—married, had three children, buried two husbands, and became a writer. So, I have a long history with the town that gave me so much. Let me tell you a little about it.

This northern Texas town sits fifteen miles from the Oklahoma line on the Wichita River. It was platted in July 1976 on land where a group of settlers already had homes. One family made a living hauling buffalo hides and had a long history in the area.

COMANCHERIA

We get our name from the Wichita Indians living in the area that also had some waterfalls. However, the natural waterfalls later washed away in a flood and artificial ones were built many years later in 1987. The Spanish called these lands Comancheria because they were controlled by the Comanche Indians. We have a very long history with the Comanches.

A VISONARY

Joseph A. Kemp (c._1917) Wikimedia Commons

One man had a vision of prosperity here—Joseph Kemp. You might say he was our founding father. Kemp, a businessman who always looked for opportunity, arrived with his family in 1883 after the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad arrived the year previous. Kemp wasted no time in opening the J.A. Kemp Wholesale Grocery and got a contract to furnish supplies to the Indian Reservation at Fort Sill in Indian Territory as well as to ranchers and settlers. He did over $1 million dollars worth of business annually and cemented Wichita Falls as a trade center.

Frank Kell, Kemp’s brother-in-law, arrived around 1885. Together, the two men became pioneers in retail food and processing, flour milling, railroads, cattle, banking, and oil. The town owes it’s success to these giants who were progressive thinkers.

BANK ROBBERY

On the afternoon of February 25, 1896, two outlaws robbed the City National Bank and killed the clerk. They made off with $410 and hid in a thicket outside of town. The Texas Rangers tracked them down and brought them back to town the next day. However, the angry townsfolk dragged them from the jail and hung them from a lamp post in front of the bank. The pair was buried in the local cemetery in the same grave, instead of separately.

(As a side note, Jesse James’ sister, Susan Parmer, is also buried in the same cemetery. I’ve visited both of these gravesites.)

TORNADOS

The town experienced two violent tornados—the first in 1964 that killed 7 people and left over a hundred wounded; the second was a massive one in 1979 in which 42 people died and 1,800 wounded.

The historic second one, April 1979, left 20,000 people homeless. We still call it Terrible Tuesday. I lived through this with my husband and three children and became one of the 20,000. While the tornado was horrific and wiped out every single thing we had, the aftermath was far worse. We were lucky to have survived with only scrapes and bruises, but the destruction and trauma left behind was indescribable. We had no place to live for a long time and simply shifted around between with various family for short periods until they got tired of us. My two oldest slept in all their clothes, down to their shoes, for about the first year. Their school was destroyed so they doubled up in others and only went half days. I would get calls almost every day telling me to come get them because they wouldn’t stop crying. The counselors who provided therapy were little help. We all suffered from PTSD although we didn’t know what to call it. My youngest was just a baby so has no memory, thank goodness. We were so lucky. It’s a memory that haunts me to this day. The sound, the horrible stench, the raw fear as the roof came down, burying us, is something I’ll live with for the rest of my life.

Wichita Falls is home to the large Sheppard Air Force Base, Midwestern State University, and over 100,000 people. Our governor, Gregg Abbott, was born here as well as Phil McGraw and Larry McMurtry plus rodeo & TV stars, race car drivers, and so many others.

I became a New York Times bestselling author here and will always remember the many kindnesses and generosity shown during my years as one of its citizens.

What are some of the things your town is known for? I’ll give away a $15 Amazon gift card to one commenter. 

Nature’s Fury and a Giveaway

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Every so often Mother Nature has to throw a fit. That’s just the way it is and the havoc can come in the form of floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornados and many other disasters. Sometimes these weather occurrences make their way into our stories.

Living in Tornado Alley, I’m most familiar with tornados. I survived an enormous North Texas twister on April 10, 1979 that took 52 lives when three vortexes merged into one. Meteorologists still refer to that day as Terrible Tuesday because of the immense devastation and the sheer numbers. There were 59 reported tornados on the ground in the area on that Tuesday. The F-5 monster that hit Wichita Falls left a path of destruction 8 miles wide and 47 miles long.

Pretty unbelievable and so frightening.

The impact it made on my life remains 42 years later and to this day get very emotional when I talk about it. The sirens had been going off all day so I didn’t pay any mind to the last one that went off a little before 6:00 pm. I was cooking supper and the kids were playing as normal. It was my first husband and my wedding anniversary and we’d planned to go out to celebrate.

Our kids were 7, 5, and 8 months old—much too young to learn about life and death and the kind of terror that freezes the screams in a person’s throat.

My husband went out to look at the sky and saw the massive thing coming. It resembled a hungry beast gobbling up everything in its path. The rumble was one of the most terrifying sounds I’d ever heard before or since. We had no time to pull mattresses off the beds or blankets over us. We rushed the kids to a narrow hallway that ran the length of the three bedrooms and laid down on top of them. My baby daughter laid under me so very still. I had my eyes clenched shut, praying. I didn’t know of anyone who’d lived through something like that with minimal protection. Here are some pictures. The camera wasn’t very good.

         

It tore right through our house, our neighborhood where we’d felt so safe. I heard when the roof went and boards and debris reined down on top of us. I never felt anything though and thought that was odd. I was just too terrified and in shock. I’m sure that’s probably the way soldiers are in war. You just never think anything like that will happen to you.

Time moved in slow motion and seemed to take hours for the tornado to pass on when in reality it only lasted a few minutes. Then hail the size of golf balls pounded us as we climbed out from under the pile of debris on top of us. We checked the kids and the only injury was a minor cut on top of the baby’s head. So miraculous, especially when we got the first look at our flattened neighborhood. In each direction we stared, it looked like a bomb had gone off and a pungent, sickening smell hung in the air. The smell lasted for months afterward. So did the roofing tar embedded in our scalps. This picture is of me in bell bottom pants with Baby Girl. 

But then, we didn’t know what to do next. Did we hang around and wait for someone to come tell us something? But if we left, where did we go? Our car was sitting on top of a tree, besides we had no close relatives. It was getting dark and the baby was hungry.

We started to set off walking, then realized the older children were barefoot. The tornado had sucked the shoes off their feet. My husband carried our 5-year-old and our son had to pick his way very carefully. Trees and power lines were down everywhere. Thankfully, a man with a carload of others like us stopped and picked us up. We went to a woman I worked with and spent the night with her.

People have asked over the years why I’ve never written my account, but the truth is I couldn’t relive that horror. Or the year of homelessness after that. It had stolen far too much of me. It took everything we owned.  

However, I did insert a tornado scene in Once Upon a Mail Order Bride. But, the only way I was able to do it was by putting Ridge and Addie in open country, somewhere totally different from my experience. They had to run for their lives and leap into a ravine to beat death. But the horrendous sounds, smells, heart pounding fear that rose in their throats, strangling them came from what I remembered and felt.

Have you ever had something happen so powerful that it left a lasting effect on you and maybe altered the course of your life? Or have you read about a big weather event in a book? I know Sharon Sala has written about Hurricane Katrina. I’m giving away a copy of Once Upon a Mail Order Bride to someone who comments. I wish I had room for the excerpt of that scene but this post is getting really long.